Close encounters of the most absurd kind
Cate Blanchett has supplied the strangest moment of this year’s Cannes film festival, for Brits of a certain age, anyway. Her character reverently invokes the name of the late Roy Jenkins, political grandee and former chancellor of both the exchequer and Oxford University.
Blanchett plays a fictional German chancellor called Hilda Ortmann who mentions Jenkins as the first president of the European Commission allowed to attend a G7 summit (which, as political trivia connoisseurs would say, is “one for the heads”).
Rumours is an amusing drawingroom absurdist comedy, co-written and directed by Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin with his longtime collaborators, the brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. The title is inspired by the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album, because of the emotional crises that are said to have accompanied its recording.
The setting is a forest in the German town of Dankerode in Saxony where a fictional G7 summit is taking place. Seven government heads have gathered to discuss an unspecified (but apparently ecological) crisis and to draft a lengthy and fantastically unhelpful communique which, as Hilda murmurs to her French counterpart, President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), should be worded vaguely so they are not committed to any specific action.
The US president, Edison Wolcott, is ageing and somnolent; he is played by Charles Dance, confusingly with his own English voice, and the script has a joke about Dance being apparently unwilling (but surely not unable) to do an American accent. British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki AmukaBird) is stressed because she had an affair at the last G7 with troubled Canadian premier and ladies’ man Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who also carries a torch for European Commission secretary-general Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) and has a moment with Hilda.
Their lakeside G7 dinner is thrown into crisis when they realise that their phones don’t work; the chateau HQ and probably the whole town has been abandoned and they are now utterly alone – except for the 2,000-year-old humans discovered embalmed in the Dankerode clay which have now come to life, stumbling around the place and frantically masturbating so that the resulting tsunami of seed will both extinguish the catastrophic fires and engender an enlightened new people.
Rumours is weird and confusing, with strange forest encounters and apocalyptic episodes. A droll account of the world’s end.